And the Winner Is...

At long last, 2003 has run its weary course, and we calendar keepers are now officially burning through the early weeks of a new year. This can mean only one thing: That magical time of the year, film award season, is upon us. Two weeks ago, it was the Golden Globes, in which we learned a fantasy-adventure movie like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is indeed able to take home best director, best dramatic picture and other top prizes.

The Hollywood Foreign Press has been handing out the Globes for almost as long (61 years!) as the Oscars have been around. Until recently, the Globes suffered under a reputation as an anemic imitation of the Oscars. Nowadays, they're thought of as a pre-Academy litmus test, though more laid-back than the dour Oscar ceremony, because drunk and disorderly celebrities sometimes say wonderfully embarrassing things.

But the Globes are only one of a number of award shows, which, at this point, can be divided into those that have already nominated and presented awards, and those still yet to come. A list of the former includes the National Board of Review, the Southeastern Film Critics, the Producers Guild of America, the British Academy of Film and Television and film critics in Boston, San Francisco, Washington, Toronto, San Diego, Seattle, Florida and Kansas City.

Award shows yet to come, beginning this weekend with the Directors Guild of America, are the American Society of Cinematographers, American Cinema Editors, Visual Effects Society, Writers Guild of America, Cinema Audio Society, Screen Actors Guild and, finally, the Oscars.

Oscar, bless his naked little soul, is no longer the only show in town -- hasn't been for a number of years. Some say this award-show glut has cheapened the whole shebang. Oscar knows it too. This year, to avoid being the award season footnote, the show was moved up a full month earlier, to Feb. 29.

Will this help? Does anyone care?

There was a time, of course, when the Oscars did mean something, easily earning their reputation as the undisputed Super Bowl of the filmmaking world. As an important pop-culture event, the Academy Awards ceremony was second to none, annually ranking among the highest-rated television broadcasts and enticing stars like Cher to improbable flights of fabric-twisting fancy.

They're All Winners

Those days, of course, are long gone. For good or ill, we now live in award-show overload. Every profession feels strangely entitled to its own Oscar-like honoring system. From insurance sales (Product Line Solution Awards) to foundation application (Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Awards) to prostitution (the Aspasia Awards).

Such award-oriented thinking has become so integrated into our lives it has become an automatic expression of affection. Even the lowliest and least-funded among us are finding ourselves compelled to have some Oscar-like fun. Armed with little than a website and a sense of humor, hundreds of alternative award shows have popped up, some not much more than elaborate hoaxes, other possessing more serious intentions.

Thankfully, these ingenious folks have been quietly co-opting the traditions and structures and parlance of awards season and are using them to satirize the system, as well as to make comments on the condition of the arts and various other issues of the wider world.

Such underworld flimflammery is exciting, and unlike the average, four-hour Oscar telecast, these alternative "awards" are seldom boring. But then, many of them exist without benefit of an actual awards event, and sometimes without actual awards. Still, unlike such big-budget galas as the Oscars, some of these lesser efforts actually mean something.

Many of these efforts -- fluttering somewhere in that Internet neversphere between community service and personal expression -- will never amount to anything. Others are sure to become as notorious as the Darwin Awards.